


Short Fic and Prompt Meme Responses: Stargate Atlantis

by synecdochic



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Ficlet Collection, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-24
Updated: 2006-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-28 18:04:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6339757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synecdochic/pseuds/synecdochic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The catch-all collection for all my Stargate Atlantis commentfic and prompt meme responses, scrounged from all over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. comment prompt: john/rodney

**Author's Note:**

> Each chapter is a separate fic. Tags/pairings/etc are for the whole collection, not any given individual chapter.

It turned out that the Athosians had a spring fertility festival, and since Elizabeth was on a cultural sensitivity kick this month and _everybody_ needed some downtime and hey, nobody had even tried to shoot at them yet this week, well, it got out of control faster than even things in Pegasus tended to. 

Which was why, when John went looking for Rodney, he found him in the auxiliary backup lab, surrounded by fifteen beakers, each of which was full of a different color liquid, all of which were simmering slightly on the Ancient version of a Bunsen burner. Usually, Rodney would have snapped up his head after a minute when he noticed John standing there, but whatever he was doing had his full attention; John could lounge in the doorway and watch to his heart's content.

And watch he did, as Rodney bent over something -- John couldn't quite see what -- in his hands, hand moving in a precise, calculated fashion, almost like a draftsman planning a skyscraper; after a minute, he dipped his -- stylus? -- in a pot of something -- was that wax? and brought it back to...

"You're dyeing Easter eggs?" John blurted. 

Rodney looked up and glared. "You were supposed to be in a meeting," he accused.

"You're not even _religious_ ," John said. "You _hate_ religion." 

Rodney scoffed. "This isn't religion," he said. "It's science. Do you have any idea how long it took me to come up with decent, color-safe dyes with the chemicals we still have left?" As John watched, he dabbed another spot of wax on the ... yes, it _was_ an egg, and then dropped it into the bath of yellow.

"Are you sure something hasn't gotten into the air ducts?" John asked, after a minute. "Some sort of mind-control drug?"

"That's the vinegar you're smelling," Rodney said, absently, and turned to the next egg. 

"Right," John said. "Well, since you're clearly embracing the festival spirit, I suppose that means you won't mind wearing the Playboy bunny ears later on tonight."

"Try it and die," Rodney said. 

John went away whistling, wondering where Teyla was at this time of afternoon and whether or not her people knew of any fur that could pass for rabbit. Rodney would look quite fetching in the tail.


	2. Comment fic: move-in day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _Given the new influx of personnel due with the Deadalus in ten days, the awkward abundance of rooms vacated by those who never came back, and grumbling from people who hadn't realized they were choosing a room assignment for the long haul, Elizabeth declared a general do-over for quarters selection._
> 
>  
> 
> _"You remember college," Elizabeth said. "Think of it like room draw, only you won't have you parents' station wagon parked out on the quad."_

"Think of it like room draw," Elizabeth said, "only without your parents' station wagon parked out on the quad."

There was a long minute of silence, and then John said, "Well, we _have_ cleared far more living space than we had the last time we assigned quarters, and there's always south pier..."

"What is a quad?" Teyla asked. 

"I call priority on anything with a Jacuzzi," Rodney said.

Atlantis being Atlantis, it got out of hand quickly. Elizabeth's original idea had involved floor plans and randomly-assigned numbers for choice, just like undergraduate days, but after two days of the kind of righteous indignation that comes from people who think they're getting screwed out of the rewards they so rightfully deserve, half the science department sent her a delegation with a petition for justice and an algorithm developed by one of their mathematicians. The next thing she knew, she was being presented with a complex formula involving seniority on the expedition, length of service with the SGC, military rank where applicable, and the square root of negative pi. She tried to explain to them that she was trying to keep it simple, but before she knew what she'd agreed to, there were charts and randomizers and daily contests to see who could crack the random-number generator to prejudice it in the favor of -- or against -- specific individuals.

Rodney sent her a five-page email about why he, as the most vital person to the expedition's continued health, safety, and well-being, deserved the best quarters possible. Teyla watched with her very best "I do not understand you, but I find you quite amusing" enigmatic smile fixed on her face.

When word filtered back up to her that good room-draw numbers were up to a dozen Cadbury chocolate bars, a pound of coffee, and a forty-five minute backrub on the thriving black market, she contemplated putting her foot down, but really, she was more amused than she should have been, and she _did_ have a fresh copy of the random number generator on her personal laptop. The one that never got connected to the LAN.

Airman First Class Stephen Zawicki, late of Boise, Idaho, wound up thinking his Jacuzzi was the best part about Atlantis.


	3. comment prompt: stranded

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _McKay. Zelenka. Stranded somewhere banal, there's one last health bar in the survival pack, and all the local produce available is citrus._
> 
>  
> 
> _Also, there are pirates. Or perhaps ninjas._

"Never again," Zelenka said. "Never."

Rodney, busy trying to rig an alarm for the mouth of the cave out of the spare parts he'd never gotten around to taking out of the bottom of his backpack, didn't bother to look up. "Never what?"

"Never will I let you talk me into going off-planet again. Every time. Every time, something happens, and I think: will we get home safely? Will we get home at all? Will Rodney wind up with someone else in his _brain_ this time?"

Rodney spun around and pointed a finger at Zelenka. "That was _once_."

Zelenka threw up his hands. "Once was enough! You are a trouble magnet. Trouble seeks you out. Trouble _courts_ you. Like a lover."

"No one is trying to shoot us this time," Rodney said. "It rates pretty high on my 'stranded on an alien planet' list!"

"The fact you have such a list is proof enough." Zelenka folded his arms across his chest. "Now be quiet. The ninjas outside will hear you."


	4. comment prompt: song lyrics

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _There's so many strange places I'd like to be -_  
>  But none of them permanently.

When Lorne first accepted the transfer to the SGC, he'd never dreamed, even after signing all the papers and getting all the clearances, that someday he'd live a life where he'd have to keep a running tally of the number of planets he'd seen the sun rise over. There was M28-B51, where the sky was purple and the grass pooled and bent like butterfly wings in the wind. P83-47A, small and polished like a jewel, with three moons rising over fields of ice and snow. M7L-455, beaches and sand and beautiful, buxom women who kissed them hello and wove them bracelets and crowns of fronds. Each one possessed of a terrible beauty, dawning and ebbing and flowing over him; each one the study of a lifetime, of someone else's lifetime, waiting to be started.

They call the planet Atlantis, after the city: not P42-1B7, but _Atlantis_ , because naming it makes it real. Makes it _immediate_ , immanent, empirical. The people here came from Earth -- well, most of them did, anyway -- but he can already tell that the people who came with him on the _Daedalus_ are going to fall into two categories: those who think this means it's going to be utterly familiar, and those who realize it means it's going to be the most alien place they've ever been.

On his first morning on Atlantis, Lorne takes a mug of what serves as caffeine-substitute -- it is his experience that there is always a beverage that fills the role, no matter what it is called -- and stands on the balcony to watch the sun rise. It's beautiful here, breathtaking vistas of ocean and sky. The city is much the same, delicate architecture rising in mankind's perpetual mark against landscape, some of the loveliest he's ever seen, really: complementing rather than competing, an organic blend of angle and curve. It isn't a bad place to be stationed, overall. He's sure that someday, he'll be quite sorry to leave.


	5. comment prompt: the ancient gene

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _John/Rodney, Rodney's first experiences with having the gene and using it._

_Quiet_ , Sheppard says: not in words, but in the tilt of his head and the curve of his neck, the set of his hands and the lines of his lips; _you must be still, you must make of the self a vessel where there is no self_ , though his mouth says, only, "listen". Rodney only half-remembers the class, general education and a waste of his time, comparative religions with Dr. Donner droning on and on about zen mind, no-mind, Buddha-consciousness and the river that is not a river and the Way that is not a Way, and the chair-room is freezing and he can no longer feel his fingers, curled over the arms and seeking, questing, searching for something to move, to fix, to _touch_ but he is here, now, dissolving into each component part. 

Sheppard, silently, says _don't think, just be_ , and Rodney can feel him fumbling, struggling for words to encompass that which can have no words, the sweet low hum of potential waiting for the right hand, the _proper_ hand, to cup the surface, draw up a handful of stardust, sending ripples and eddies through parts of him he had never hoped to touch: not this, never this, this was for the others, the _chosen_ , and he could have spent his life with his nose pressed to the window-pane watching so many things but this, this is like music, like math, like perfection, the cool crisp clarity of everything right and good waiting for him to wrap his mind around it and _understand_.

Voiceless, breathless, Sheppard's hands close over his: _the death of the mind gives birth to wisdom, and this wisdom is timeless, boundless state, right here and now, where there is no self to take refuge in_ and there, for just a moment, the luminous clear essence fills him, becomes him, and he is drowning in it, whole and complete, and he is become vessel and incubator, the world in him. 

He holds himself still, and does not think to breathe. Beneath him, Atlantis sings.


	6. comment prompt: ozone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _john/rodney, watercolours, the scent of ozone_

"Sometimes I wonder if we're dreaming," Rodney says, without turning away from the window. His skin is painted with moonlight, Castor waning ice and Pollux waxing violet, and they've finally learned how to coax the city's windows into opening to the midnight breeze.

John needs sleep more than Rodney does; sometimes he thinks Rodney hoards his sleep deficit like others might hoard coffee or chocolate or gold. He is sprawled on the bed, half-sensate, with one eye lazily awake and watching. Still finding it hard to believe that this is something he wants to watch. "Come back to bed," he murmurs, half-drowning with dreams.

"No, I mean -- Have you ever had a dream, one of those that are crystal clear and so incredibly detailed, the kind where you have everything you've ever wanted and you do everything you always thought you could never do, and it's real and it's perfect and then you open your eyes and you wake up and you don't have it anymore?" Rodney turns, then, his face in the shadows, his eyes dark pools of nothingness.

John sighs and summits the brief peak of consciousness, long enough to hold out a languid hand. "Come here," he repeats, and Rodney hesitates, breathes in, breathes out. The bed dips beneath his weight, and he arranges himself with careful attention to detail, draped over John, the faintest hint of lingering nervous energy quivering under his skin. John strokes a hand along Rodney's back, clumsily, weighted down by sleep. "This isn't a dream," he says. 

Rodney is silent for a long minute, and then says, against John's shoulder, "Yeah. I suppose if we were in your dream, it would have more flying in it."

John doesn't tell Rodney that he's always thought Rodney's skin smells like the sky.


	7. comment prompt: zelenka

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _Something with Zelenka and his That-Guy-ness. Possibly with John. But not John/Radek. Sort of quiet and a bit of the everyday. Like that._
> 
>  
> 
> (It went in a totally different direction.)

It is well-known, the biologists say (in hushed whispers at certain times, because knowing something and wanting to talk about it are two entirely different things) that any group of women living in close quarters begin to take on a certain -- similarity of cycle. Mother Nature, after all, is a capricious and whimsical bitch, and we are, perhaps, none of us so far descended from our ancestors to be free of her dictates.

In practice, it means that five days out of every month, Atlantis's men _hide_. If they know what's good for them.

But Radek is the youngest of five, and his four older sisters have taught him patience, understanding, and the value of the well-timed chocolate bar. When Miko bursts into tears for no reason, he hands her Kleenex and pats her hand and then distracts her with the new labs they've uncovered in East Six. When Brewer snaps his head off for borrowing the last mechanical pencil with any lead remaining, he tracks it from hand to hand until he finally turns it up in Biochem, and returns it with apology. 

He saves the chocolate bars for Elizabeth, who never gives any sign but a tightening around her eyes and her mouth, and she smiles at him like he's a saviour. Perhaps someday he will work up the courage to offer to rub her back.


	8. answer when they're called to serving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No prompt: this was the beginning of a longer piece that I stalled out on and then realized I'd already said most of what I'd wanted to say in my other SGA stuff. Originally [posted](https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/90359.html) 2006-12-29.

Two days before zero hour, those days when Elizabeth had to carefully fold her hands together to keep them from shaking whenever anyone was watching her, O'Neill stopped her in the hallway outside the Gate room with a hand to her shoulder. She was surprised that the excitement, the nerves, didn't drum up a spark of static electricity when he touched her. Next to him, she felt clumsy, obvious: like an imposter playing at being in charge. 

Maybe O'Neill understood, though, because all he did was say her name, soft and low. Something in the intonation made her stop, come to a rest and a stillness she hadn't found since before the moment she first heard Dr. Jackson breathe the word _Atlantis_ like it was Christmas morning.

"A word of advice," O'Neill said to her. 

She summoned her very best leader's smile, the one saying _I have no idea what we're doing but let's all figure it out together_. "I'm sure you could give me a lot of good advice, General."

But O'Neill was soft and serious. "Pick your man early," he said. "The one you'll rely on to do the things nobody should have to do. Because the time is gonna come, and I hope to God you're never going to need him, but when you do, you're going to need to know which one he is. And you don't want to have to create him."

Elizabeth didn't understand what he meant. But when she tries to catch Major Sheppard's eyes while he's making his report, him staring woodenly over her shoulder and reciting facts in a voice that feels like fall leaves, it comes back to her. When Sheppard gets to Colonel Sumner's death, she suddenly realizes that if General O'Neill was right -- and of _course_ O'Neill was right; she never should have doubted -- she's probably found the one he meant.


End file.
